TOP STORY

By Jeff Bryant

“Betsy DeVos may have won her contest in the Senate to become the new U.S. Secretary of Education, but her opposition wasn’t the only thing that went down to defeat that day. For decades, federal education policies have been governed by a “Washington Consensus” that public schools are effectively broken … and the only way to fix them is to apply a dose of tough love and a business philosophy of competition from charter schools and performance measurements based on standardized tests … That consensus appears dead … But what looks like the death of a political consensus on education could be the beginning of something else.”Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

Vox

“Vice President Mike Pence broke a Senate tie to confirm Betsy DeVos, 51-50, as the next education secretary … So the thousands of Americans who called their senators begging them to vote against DeVos, in the end, aren’t going to get what they want … But that doesn’t mean the opposition failed utterly… DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor with scant experience with traditional public schools, has sparked an overwhelming response from activists … Americans don’t usually get this worked up about education. But DeVos might have struck a chord because education is a subject that many people take personally – and one that affects even white, upper-middle-class people.”Read more …

The Hill

“On the same day the Senate confirmed President Trump’s secretary of Education pick by a historically narrow margin, a House Republican introduced legislation to abolish the entire department Betsy DeVos will lead. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s bill is only a page long, after merely stating the Department of Education would terminate on Dec. 31, 2018.”Read more …

Education Week

“Republican lawmakers in Congress are moving to do away with regulations from the Obama administration regarding accountability under the Every Student Succeeds Act and teacher preparation … If these regulations are overturned, President Donald Trump’s administration would be prohibited from issuing ‘substantially similar’ regulations on these two issues if there isn’t a new law signed … These moves by GOP lawmakers don’t immediately end those ESSA accountability and teacher-prep rules. However, they signal that the Republicans are preparing to do away with them.”Read more …

City Lab

“We’ve gotten used to explaining the segregation we see in our schools by pointing to the segregation we see in our neighborhoods … That explanation has it backwards. In many cities across the U.S., public schools were the first and nearly always the most effective of the tools white residents had to police the boundaries of their neighborhoods. Often, it was school segregation that created neighborhood segregation, not the other way around.”Read more …

Mother Jones

“American public schools … were founded to maintain a pluralistic democracy and protect citizens against the tyranny of the majority. Advocates for the public education system argued that the unique American experiment wouldn’t work without it – that schools were the most effective mechanism for instilling civic values… Courses in civic studies were common in American high schools … All that changed most notably in the 1980s, when, in addition to earlier cuts in civic studies, policymakers began shifting the focus from social studies toward easily testable subjects like math and reading … In 2011, all federal funding for civics and social studies was eliminated.”Read more …